I'm happy ( And proud ) to announce that after more than 7 months of intense and hard work, lost hairs, etc ... sIBL_GUI 4 is finally out!

With over 1250 commits, this release is sIBL_GUI biggest and most important one. Virtually every line of code has been affected in a way or another. sIBL_GUI weights now nearly 60000 lines ( 25000 logic code lines / 35000 code documentation lines ).

* * * Important Notices * * *

"sIBL_GUI 4.0.0" preferences are now stored per version in a directory following this structure : "./HDRLabs/sIBL_GUI/$MAJOR_VERSION.$MINOR_VERSION".

Previous Maya, Softimage / XSI and 3dsMax Helper Scripts are not compatible with sIBL_GUI 4.0.0 and need to be updated if you use them.

Here are some visible highlights:

New unified dark themed Ui.

New Inspect layout to browse your collections using large images preview.

New "Edit" layout featuring Umbra Script Editor to interact directly with sIBL_GUI and the various resources files.

Support for Ibl Sets plates has been added, although not in Templates yet.

Startup speed has been dramatically increased ( Between 4 to 6 times faster, the first launch sIBL_GUI will have to compile the bytecode and will be a bit slower to start ).

Templates settings are now stored / restored for each template.

Maya templates have been ported to Python and feature a cleaner code.

3dsMax and Softimage / XSI templates have been refactored and feature a cleaner code.

Done. The entire archive is updated, including the featured sets from the last few months and remastered sets from Bob Groothuis.

Awesome Christian, it's very cool

By the mean time I released sIBL_GUI 4.0.1 - Beta.

The most notable feature is that I rolled in the asynchronous threaded images loading code that should be very efficient with larges databases.I also fixed an ugly memory leak related to an circular reference issue with Python interpreter ( http://bugs.python.org/issue1469629 ), not only the memory consumption should be slightly lower but the application should not slow down after an extensive use.For those interested in details, that issue resulted in underlying nodes being duplicated and not cleared from memory, in some extreme case I had like over 3000 Ibl Sets Nodes sitting in memory whereas I should have under 100.

Notice that even if affixed as Beta the downloads have been put in the Stable directories.